Russian mafia boss killed

MOSCOW—One of Russia's top crime lords was gunned down Wednesday in Moscow in what police described as a war between two powerful mobs over lucrative construction projects, allegedly including ones for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi.
Police said an unidentified gunman fired seven shots from a sniper gun at Aslan Usoyan near a restaurant in central Moscow—the third assassination attempt on him since the late 1990s.
Usoyan, also known as Grandpa Khasan, was a 75-year-old ethnic Kurd born in the former Soviet republic of Georgia. Police say for the past two decades he headed one of the region's most powerful criminal groups, which trafficked in drugs and weapons and controlled underground casinos as well as many legal businesses, including those in the construction industry.
Police said Usoyan was hit in the jaw, hospitalized in a coma and then died. Police said the gunman, who used a state-of-the-art automatic rifle issued to Russian special forces, also injured a passerby, who was hospitalized.
Usoyan came from a caste of professional criminals who sport elaborate tattoos, follow unwritten prison laws codified in Stalinist-era Gulags and have been romanticized in countless popular songs.
He was first convicted in 1956 in Georgia
                     
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